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Post PDC thoughts

Posted in Cloud Computing, microsoft on October 31, 2008 at 5:00 pm

My week of deep-diving into the world of Microsoft and its future technologies has come to an end. What a week it has been.

The time I’ve spent getting my hands dirty with the pre-beta code for Windows 7 has been nothing short of fascinating. Although the build we were able to bring back to the IT PRO offices was slightly behind the build being demoed on-stage, it nonetheless contains all the key features and technologies being touted as reasons to upgrade once Windows 7 hits the shops.

The issue of upgrading is the critical one. Microsoft continues to talk-up Vista - we would expect nothing less - yet compared to Windows 7, Vista doesn’t quite have the wow factor. Rather, Windows 7 is already shaping up to be the operating system Microsoft wanted to release two years ago, as opposed to the one it had to eventually take to market. Visually the changes are not that significant. Beyond the reworked taskbar the visuals are much the same as the Vista UI. This is not a bad thing. The Vista UI is very slick and modern, and the underlying code of Windows 7 is already showing signs at this early stage that it will deliver the operational performance that is still missing from Vista.

It is also encouraging to see that Windows 7 lelivers most of the functionality promised initially for Vista, but which failed to make it in to the final product, such as the advanced search capabilties.

By the end of PDC, there was still plenty of buzz around Azure, the company’s biggest push into the world of cloud computing. Developers love the idea of such a significant cloud platform, backed up with colossal amounts of processing and storage power, as well as true global distributed computing centres.

However, many of the developers I spoke with at PDC remain wary of doing too much with any hosted service in beta, even when they are being given away for free (and without any guarantees) while in the beta process.

Until such time as Microsoft can put a price on the Azure service and offer at least an idea of the service level agreement it will be able to commit to when the service comes out of beta, developers will remain wary of it. Not due to any failings of the platform as such, but simply becasue many won’t want to produce a successful app this early on that depends on a cloud envronment that may go up and down like a yoyo. The sooner Microsoft can both monetise Azure and guarantee quality of service, the sooner corporate customers and mainstream developers will flock to it. The key components to make Azure a successful platform and business for Microsoft are there, all that is needed is a sign of progress and a measure of the support that developers and users can expect once it launches as a 1.0 service. Once that can be quantified, then expect Azure to become an essential component of most mainstream web services that need lots of storage or lots of processing power on-demand.

Of course, there was more to PDC than just Azure and Windows 7. We got a very early peek at the work being done on the next version of Office, which will see the user interface settle down following the move to the ‘ribbon’, as well as more collaborative working features and closer integration with Microsoft’s unified communications products.

There was also a lot going on with core developer tools, from useful tools like Oomph to major progress on the next version of Visual Studio.

In short, after a few years of being in the doldrums, Microsoft finally has some meaningful buzz around it again. The next 18 months are going to be very exciting for users and developers alike.